Germany arrests 93-yo former Nazi medic over WWII Auschwitz massacres

German police have arrested a former Nazi medic on suspicion of "multiple counts" of aiding and abetting murder when he was serving as a medic in the Auschwitz death camp, according to the local prosecutors’ office.

A 93-year-old suspect was arrested on Monday at his home near the
town of Neubrandenburg, in the federal state of
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in northern Germany.

A doctor examined the man after his arrest and determined that
the suspect “was in good enough health to be held in custody
while authorities investigate further,” according to Stefan
Urbanek, spokesman from the prosecutors' office in Schwerin, the
state capital.

The prosecutor refused to reveal the pensioner’s identity due to
German privacy rules. The man is now being held in pre-trial
detention.

A former member of the SS (Schutzstaffel), a major paramilitary
organization under the Nazis from 1925 to 1945, the accused
allegedly assisted in massacres of prisoners transported from
Germany, Austria, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovenia to
the Auschwitz -Birkenau camp in September 1944.

Nearly 1,721 of those who arrived that year in the camp were
killed in gas chambers, after they were considered unfit for
forced labor, said the prosecution office.

According to Schwerin authorities, the arrest of the Nazi medic
came after a tip-off from the German office investigating Nazi
war crimes. However, the prosecutors did not specify when exactly
the call took place.

The World Jewish Congress immediately praised Germany for "not
relenting in the pursuit of those who murdered, or aided in
murdering, thousands of people during World War II."

"The prosecution of those who participated in terrible crimes
sends a clear message that justice must be done, no matter how
late the hour," said Ronald Lauder, World Jewish Congress
president, adding that “mass murderers must continue to live
in fear of the long arm of the law.”

The Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, built and operated by
the Third Reich in occupied Poland, was the largest Nazi
concentration camp during WWII. It was established as the place
of "final solution” in the policy of annihilating the
Jewish people in Europe.

About 1.3 million people of various nationalities were killed in
the camp, around 90 percent were Jewish, according to data given
by the Memorial and Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Those not killed
in the gas chambers died of starvation, forced labor, infectious
diseases, individual executions, and medical experiments.

In 1958 German authorities founded the center for solving crimes
of National Socialism in Ludwigsburg. Since then it has tracked
down a total of 7,485 Nazi criminals.

German authorities only prosecuted Nazi war criminals if evidence
proved their personal commitment in war crimes. However, the
situation changed in 2011 after a Munich court sentenced SS
voluntary assistant, Ivan Demjanjuk, to five years in prison when he was found
guilty of complicity in some 30,000 Jewish deaths in
German-occupied Poland during World War II. He is being cited as
an example by the center as a reason for people not to rest on
their laurels when it comes to catching remaining war criminals.

After the arrest of Demjanjuk, Germany launched a renewed Nazi-hunting campaign in the
summer of 2013, with the aim of bringing to justice surviving
suspects involved in World War II hate crimes. Two thousand
placards with a tagline that reads “Late, but not too late” have
been plastered across German cities, including Berlin, with the
intention of trapping the dregs of Germany’s Nazi war criminals.

One of the latest cases was in January 2014, when the country
charged an 88-year-old man with involvement in one of the Nazi’s
worst massacres in a village in central France in June of 1944,
when 642 people were murdered.